I used to model professionally for a few years -years back now. My frank and ruthless 2 cents on it is that if you take offense to something said about photos of yourself then you're obviously not a real professional model. Being a model means being cattle in fashionable clothes and backgrounds -glorified coat hangers was a term my first agent used -accurately. You have to have a thick skin because prospective clients don't look at you as a person but as a possibility to make their products look good, that's the whole point of the industry, and if you become friends with them or they treat you nice, that's a perk, but not a typical trait therein. Fake niceness runs rampant, sure. Networking makes money. Our crowd, having a lot of creatives and a saturated photography market creates many opportunities for non or sparcely working models and photographers to get together and make some yummy stuff. -Thus all the 'look at me's. I agree the importance to merit ratio is off. I, for one, do shoots kind of oftenish (as one might guess from the avatars -I need to rotate some too) but I don't pipe up about it because it's not a big deal. Gee; I'm kind of glad I haven't had time to check the crackboard much lately. ;-p